As part of his round of press interviews to coincide with the consumer launch of Vista, Bill Gates has given an interview to Newsweek which has got various people in the Mac community amused. The question that has attracted most attention is on page 2 of the interview:

In many of the Vista reviews, even the positive ones, people note that some Vista features are already in the Mac operating system.

In answer, Gates claims that Apple in fact copied Microsoft, and then this is the key quote:

“Security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.�

The funny thing is, if security guys are coming out with these total exploits every day – where are they?

Anyway, there is a bit of a backlash beginning with regards to Vista, with Robert Preston, the BBC Business Editor not pleased at the performance of his new Vista laptop, particularly the fact that it won’t work with either his IPAQ, or his digital recorder. We’ve also had another person, who after discovering that Vista wouldn’t work with his hardware installed it somewhere else and recorded the act on YouTube. Alongside this, independent tests appear to have recorded a fail for Vista in the security stakes.

Apple too are putting the boot in, with a new advert targeting my own least favourite Vista feature, User Account Control:

Possibly a bit of a cheap shot, but after the pretty well unsubstantiated security comment from Gates I can only see things degenerating further as we approach the release of Leopard…